Horror Stories and Surprises

Well some odd things happened over the last few days, and you might enjoy reading about the horror and surprises

It started a few months ago when i wrote a little "dirty script" called "hotfeed".You can find it here http://www.wptrends.com/about

The script is generating Google Trends "loaded" RSS feeds, and it can be used in conjunction eg. with Wordpress and Autoblogging plugins.

The result is that you get your blog filled with content 24/7 which is always related to the current Google trends keyword.

Ok, this blog entry is no sales pitch, but you need to know the background.

A few weeks ago i went one of my blogs where hotfeed is running and i updated some plugins (mainly feedwordpress) and i also added "twitter poster" on the blog which will tweet each new post to my twitter account. Right now i have only 2100 followers, its really no "mega" twitter account.

Whatever i did on the blog resulted in traffic spikes ranging from 1500-1800 daily uniques to 2904 uniques, and this totally shocked and surprised me. Hotfeed was certainly made to exactly achieve THIS - but i didn't know it will work THAT well.

Now...what i did NOT know was that the autoblogging plugins i had running on that blog PLUS the traffic spikes PLUS the twitter poster created MASSIVE load on my server. I had very cheap shared hosting with "X" where i only paid a couple bucks a month. VERY good hosting i might want to add!

Now..i als didnt know that my massive traffic and the plugins literally crushed their servers for days and days, and the hosting company spend a few thousand dollars and many man hours to track down what on earth would bog down their servers that much!

I had a problem and i filled out a ticket, and then we discovered that in fact my account with them was the one causing the huge cpu overload. The twitter tweeting and the autoblogs as well as the massive traffic.

So...understandeable the company panicked and at first they suspended ALL my accounts. Including this one where i hosted 1up-seo.com.

Now, this wouldnt normally be a big. The problem was only that on ONE of my accounts which got suspended i have about 100 or so domains. The suspension meant that i had a ***LOAD of sites down. And exactly at the same time i had ezine articles out depending on clicks from people...but all those sites were DOWN.

The company was unable to reactivate that one account sicne it immediately bogged down their servers. No big deal.

I started to migrate the whole account to my VPS.

Everything looked fine, until i come up with the idea to "optimize" a few apache settings and MySQL. Because my VPS was not optimized for Wordpress, there were still some tweaks to do.

At the same time i was chatting with a "weird" person on a forum.

I went on one of my sites, and the site come up with a BLANK WORDPRESS "ready to install wordpress". A site which cost me MANY MONTHS of work. 

I went to the next wordpress blog, another site where i put MONTHS of work in it. BLANK. "Install Wordpress".

I was literally near tears. The conversation with that person, somehow i think that person hacked into my account and erased all my wordpress blogs. My main money makers. Some sites i ranked #1 in Google - and ALL those sites had a fresh/blank wordpress on them!!

Well...after i calmed down i realized that maybe i was NOT hacked, maybe i just did something stupid with my optimization. I was in the OVERLY LUCKY position that i had backups of those accounts since i was migrating those sites from that one hoster. This literally saved me!

Later on, i found out what i did wrong, so i recompiled apache a few more times, upgraded MySQL and finally added working optimizations on my VPS.

And i restored the backup, and after a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE stress day i had the majority of my sites up and running again on the new host.

With one exception: 1UP-SEO.COM! (Which i left on the other hostin provider)

The hoster suspended 1up-seo.com - and it causes some very weird META REFRESH causing people after two seconds to land on a "this service has been suspended page". The problem: The technicians were UNABLE to restore 1up-seo.co. It was flagged as un-suspended because it was cler that 1up-seo was not the problematic account.

So they tried to unsuspend 1up-seo but it STILL redirected people!

I tried about 3 different times to migrate 1up to my new host - with the result that it just fricking wouldn't work! I always came up blank.

I also had a backup made the day earlier...not hat i am stupid, but i just couldnt get the site to run. So, after a while i remembered that  i still have reseller hosting somewhere else, so i tried a few more times to backup and then single-file FTP down/upload....and FINALLY after a few days i somehow managed it to get 1up-seo.com running again on my other hoster.

So..end of story....i had a few days which were very stressful. And i had few surprises with Hotfeed since i never expected it being able to attract thousands of visitors. I also am glad since i learned a little more again by working on my VPS (which is hosted by SolarVPS, just as a side-note). I learned about apache optimizing and MySQL...and i learned that shared hosting can be VERY bad once you reach a certain traffic level and have some autoblog plugins running.

G.

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